Texas needs wind to pass gas when it gets cold.
Joyce Yao: Texas’ deep freeze and our energy future
Updated: 10 February 2011 05:26 PM
“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” Mark Twain is reputed to have said. And, boy, did the defenders of America’s current dirty and unreliable energy system take his advice to heart during the rolling blackouts that hit Texas’ electrical grid last week.
Rep. Joe Barton issued a news release extolling the reliability of natural gas and coal plants while stating that “we can’t depend on wind and solar power.” Rush Limbaugh blamed the blackouts on who else but President Barack Obama, saying: “If Obama gets his way, rolling blackouts will be the new norm. What do you think ‘green energy’ is?”
Strip away the political rhetoric, however, and the reality is that when Texas needed energy most last week, it was the supposedly “reliable” fossil-fuel-fired power plants that let us down. Clean energy came through in the pinch.
Texas officials are still trying to get the bottom of what happened last week. But we do know that frigid temperatures caused electricity demand to spike — setting a record for winter demand. Those same freezing temperatures also crippled several large coal-fired plants, while the natural gas plants that were supposed to pick up the slack failed to do the job. At the peak of the crisis, more than 50 power plants — accounting for 7,000 megawatts, or nearly 10 percent of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ total generation capacity — were incapacitated.
Clean-energy technologies helped keep the crisis from becoming worse. As Trip Doggett, CEO of ERCOT, told the Texas Tribune, “wind was blowing, and we had often 3,500 megawatts of wind generation during that morning peak, which certainly helped us in this situation.”
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